The hidden, overlooked and undervalued: Andrew Lambirth’s spring roundup

Jankel Adler (1895–1949), a Polish Jew who arrived in Glasgow in 1941, was invalided out of the Polish army, and moved to London two years later. A distinguished artist in his own right, he turns out to have been a hidden presence on the English art scene, a secret influence on indigenous artists. He is usually cited as a crucial inspiration for Robert Colquhoun, but as his work grows more familiar, it becomes clear that a whole host of other artists must have been aware of him, from S.W. Hayter to Cecil Collins. Interestingly, the sculptors who were coming to maturity in the 1950s (just after Adler’s death) also seem to owe him a debt: the so-called ‘Geometry of Fear’ generation of Armitage, Butler and Chadwick, to which I’d add Robert Adams and George Fullard. Picasso is often named as the chief influence on Adler himself, but actually Klee emerges as the key inspiration, the two artists becoming friends in the 1930s at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts.

Adler’s distinctive line, at once loopy and angular, questing and rhythmically enfolding, explores an essentially tragic and anarchic view of the human condition. Many of the figures in this remarkable exhibition of 100 paintings and drawings at Goldmark Gallery (14 Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland, 17 May – 25 July) are solitary if not lonely (Adler lost all his family in the Holocaust). Some are brushy yet ghostly, as if emerging from a coloured fog, lit by oddness and humour, but with visual wit to combat the bleakness. Other images move towards the abstract: decorative, even jewelled, still-lifes, and stacked forms. His friend Josef Herman quoted him writing in a letter: ‘In the 20th century a new aristocracy came into being, an “aristocracy of the spirit”. It is here that the modern artist belongs.’